Why Hybrid? Why Now?

As off-premise cloud computing adoption continues to grow in a non-linear fashion, a growing number of businesses running in-house IT environments are debating whether they should get on board as well. If you've been part of any of those conversations, you've tried to balance the hype with the most significant questions for your business: "How do we know if our company is ready to try cloud resources? And if we're ready, how do we actually get started?"

Your company is cloud-ready as soon as you understand and accept the ramifications of remote resources and scaling in the cloud model, and it doesn't have to be an "all-in" decision. If you need certain pieces of your infrastructure to reside in-house, you can start evaluating the cloud with workloads that don't have to be hosted internally. The traditional IT term for this approach is "hybrid," but that term might cause confusion these days.

In the simplest sense, a hybrid model is one in which a workload is handled by one or more non-heterogeneous elements. In the traditional IT sense, those non-heterogeneous elements are two distinct operating environments (on-prem and off-prem). In SoftLayer's world, a hybrid environment leverages different heterogeneous elements: Bare metal and virtual server instances, delivered in the cloud.

Because SoftLayer's "hybrid" and traditional IT's "hybrid" are so different, it's easy to understand the confusion in the marketplace: If a hybrid environment is generally understood to involve the connection of on-premise infrastructure to cloud resources, SoftLayer's definition seems contrarian. Actually, the use of the term is a lot more similar than I expected. In a traditional hosting environment, most businesses think in terms of bare metal (dedicated) servers, and when those businesses move "to the cloud," they're generally thinking in terms of virtualized server instances. So SoftLayer's definition of a hybrid environment is very consistent with the market definition ... It's just all hosted off-premise.

The ability to have dedicated resources intermixed with virtual resources means that workloads from on-premise hypervisors that require native or near-native performance can be moved immediately. And because those workloads don't have to be powered by in-house servers, a company's IT infrastructure moves a CapEx to an OpEx model. In the past, adopting infrastructure as a service (IaaS) involved shoehorning workloads into whichever virtual resource closest matched an existing environment, but those days are gone. Now, on-premise resources can be replicated (and upgraded) on demand in a single off-premise environment, leveraging a mix of virtual and dedicated resources.

SoftLayer's environment simplifies the process for businesses looking to move IT infrastructure off-premise. Those businesses can start by leveraging virtual server instances in a cloud environment while maintaining the in-house resources for certain workloads, and when those in-house resources reach the end of their usable life (or need an upgrade), the businesses can shift those workloads onto bare metal servers in the same cloud environment as their virtual server instances.

The real-world applications are pretty obvious: Your company is considering moving part of a workload to cloud in order to handle peak season loads at the end of the year. You've contemplated transitioning parts of your environment to the cloud, but you've convinced yourself that shared resource pools are too inefficient and full of noisy neighbor problems, so you'd never be able to move your core infrastructure to the same environment. Furthering the dilemma, you have to capitalize on the assets you already have that are still of use to the company.

You finally have the flexibility to slowly transition your environment to a scalable, flexible cloud environment without sacrificing. While the initial setup phases for a hybrid environment may seem arduous, Rome wasn't built in a day, so you shouldn't feel pressure to rush the construction of your IT environment. Here are a few key points to consider when adopting a hybrid model that will make life easier:

Keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate your environment. Keep networks, topologies and methodologies simple, and they'll be much more manageable and scalable.

Keep it sane. Hybrid mixes the best of both worlds, so chose the best assets to move over. "Best" does not necessarily mean "easiest" or "cheapest" workload, but it doesn't exclude those workloads either.

With this in mind, you're ready to take on a hybrid approach for your infrastructure. There's no certification for when your company finally becomes a "cloud company." The moment you start leveraging off-premise resources, you've got a hybrid environment, and you can adjust your mix of on-premise, off-premise, virtual and bare metal resources as your business needs change and evolve.

Comments

This is exciting for businesses, I think the move to cloud computing is one that a lot of companies could be afraid to make due to a lack of understanding. Seeing it as an everchanging move is a good way to make it seem less daunting.
I run a small business and believe it won't be too long until all businesses utilise this sort of technology.

Comments

This is exciting for businesses, I think the move to cloud computing is one that a lot of companies could be afraid to make due to a lack of understanding. Seeing it as an everchanging move is a good way to make it seem less daunting.
I run a small business and believe it won't be too long until all businesses utilise this sort of technology.